Happy Again

by Jennifer E. Smith

  The woman behind the counter barely looked up when they walked in; she just made a vague gesture at all the open tables. They walked straight to the far corner, where they slid into a booth, with Graham facing the wall, his back to the rest of the restaurant. He slid off the baseball cap as he flipped through the enormous menu, and Ellie couldn’t help smiling at the way his hair was now tousled again, just as she remembered it.

  “So how long is this movie?” she asked, pushing aside her menu.

  “Couple hours,” he said without looking up. “We’re fine.”

  The waitress appeared with two glasses of water, which sloshed over the rims as she set them down on the table. “What can I get you?” she asked, her thin face completely impassive as she pulled a notepad out of the pocket of her black apron.

  “I’ll have everything on the menu,” Graham said, and when she started to write this down, Ellie shook her head.

  “He’s kidding. Sorry. I’ll have a grilled cheese, and he’ll have a burger and fries.”

  “And two milk shakes,” Graham said, holding up a couple of fingers. “Chocolate for me.”

  “Make mine vanilla,” Ellie said, and the waitress stifled a yawn as she marked this down, then scooped up the heavy menus and walked back toward the kitchen.

  “So,” Graham said, leaning forward on the table.

  Ellie smiled. “So.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  “Everything?”

  He nodded. “I have a million questions.”

  “Ah,” she said. “So we’ve reached the Q and A portion of the evening already. How about you start with just one?”

  “Okay,” he said, twisting his mouth up at the corner. “Why’d you stop writing me?”

  Ellie gave him a level stare. “How about a different one?”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I just did.”

  He sighed. “Fine. But I’m circling back to that later, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He pulled the salt and pepper shakers toward him as he thought about his next question. “You said you drove down from school. Are you at Harvard?”

  “I am.”

  “I knew it,” he said with a satisfied smile. “I knew you had to be. How do you like it so far?”

  “You already asked your question,” she told him. “Now it’s my turn.”

  “Oh, so that’s how it’s gonna be?”

  She nodded. “Is all that stuff on the blogs true?”

  “You read gossip blogs now?”

  “Well, Quinn fills me in,” she said, which was mostly accurate.

  He laughed. “How’s Quinn?”

  “Still my turn.”

  “Okay, what stuff?”

  “About you and the cars. And the speeding tickets. And the clubs. You and that girl from that stupid zombie movie. You and Olivia.” She felt her cheeks go hot at this last one, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking.

  Graham reached for his water glass, though he didn’t take a sip. Instead, he spun it around in slippery circles on the table. “Some of it,” he said eventually.

  “Which parts?”

  “Isn’t it my turn yet?”

  “Graham,” she said, and he raised his eyes to meet hers.

  “Not the parts about the girls.”

  Ellie let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “The clubs?”

  “Here and there,” he said. “But nothing too crazy. Really. It’s mostly just the car stuff.”

  She waited for him to continue.

  “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “The only car I ever drove before all this was my mom’s minivan. And when I bought my own, I just…I don’t know. My life is so claustrophobic sometimes. I guess driving feels like a way to sort of get clear of it.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got to be careful…”

  “I don’t want to be worried when I’m in the car,” he said, a slight edge to his voice. “It’s the one place where I don’t have to deal with the cameras or the pressure or everybody telling me what to do or what they think I should do.”

  “Except for the police.”

  “It’s the one place where I feel free,” he said, ignoring her, and then he shook his head and looked down at the table. “I know that sounds melodramatic.”

  She studied him for a moment. “Do you really have a racetrack in your backyard?”

  “No,” he said, surprised. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Do you have a car seat for Wilbur?”

  “Are you kidding? He gets dizzy when he comes trotting around a corner too fast. I promise you—the last thing I’d want is a carsick pig for a copilot. Where are you getting this stuff?”

  “There are a lot of rumors out there…”

  “Yeah, well, let me set the record straight: I haven’t been driving around a backyard racetrack with my pig like some kind of eccentric billionaire.” He brightened. “I did teach him a new trick, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking proud. “I ask him to give me a kiss, and he does.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much of a trick. I think half the girls in the world would be happy to do that on command.”

  “Only half?” Graham teased, and Ellie rolled her eyes.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear you’ve mostly just been making out with Wilbur.”

  He laughed. “I’m pretty sure he feels the same way. Is it my turn again?”

  She nodded.

  “Tell me more about Harvard.”

  “It’s only been a few weeks,” she said. “Not much to tell.”

  Graham gave her a look. “Come on.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s fine?”

  “It’s Harvard. You know.”

  “I don’t, actually,” he said, rapping on his head with his knuckles. “As you may recall, I don’t go to college, so my brain is filled with movie fluff.”

  “What’s movie fluff?”

  “You know, happy endings and unlikely friendships and secret societies and janitors who turn out to be geniuses. That sort of thing.”

  They both leaned back as the waitress returned with their milk shakes, each topped with a lopsided pile of whipped cream. Ellie watched Graham take a long sip of his until the glass was half-empty.

  “You definitely should’ve worn a different pair of pants,” she said, and he laughed and patted his stomach.

  “I need to find a role that requires me to gain some weight. Then it’ll be milk shakes all day and all night…”

  “So what are you doing next?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “How come you’re avoiding the subject?”

  “What subject?”

  “Harvard. You hate it that much, huh?”

  Ellie took a pull from her straw. “I wouldn’t go right to hate…”

  “Well, what, then?”

  “I’m just not sure it’s the right fit.”

  “Come on,” Graham said, leaning forward. “You’ve wanted to go there forever. And you loved it when you were there for the poetry course.” He sat back again, looking suddenly concerned. “Didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said quickly. “I loved it. But that was different. That was two weeks. This is four years.”

  “Yeah, but you’re only a few weeks in. So what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not really Harvard. It’s me.”

  Graham laughed just as he was about to take a sip, and little bits of whipped cream went flying off the top of his glass. “That’s the oldest line in the book,” he said, wiping at his chin. “Does Harvard know you want to break up with it yet?”

  “I’m not breaking up with it,” Ellie said, tossing her balled-up straw wrapper at him. “It’s just been harder than I thought. Everyone seems to know everyone else already, and they’re all sort of the same, and I’m…”

  “You’re different,” Graham said matter-of-factly.

  Ellie nodded. “
But not in a good way. I feel like a foreign exchange student or something.”

  “What, they don’t speak Henley up there at Harvard?”

  “I think it’s more that I don’t speak New York City. Or Greenwich. Or Hamptons. Or whatever. Everyone’s perfectly nice, but it just takes so much effort to keep up, you know?”

  “My best friend is a pig,” Graham said. “Trust me, I get it.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s a pretty magnificent pig.”

  “Humble,” he agreed with a smile.

  “Radiant.”

  “So what about the other book nerds?”

  “What about them?”

  “Well, why don’t you hang out with them? There must be tons up there.”

  Ellie chose to ignore this. “It’s not just about that. It’s more that I…I can’t seem to find my footing. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Even in class—”

  “Even in class?”

  Ellie nodded. “For some reason, I haven’t said a word.”

  “At all?”

  “At all,” she confirmed as their food arrived.

  Graham had begun eating his burger almost before the plate was fully on the table, but the waitress didn’t seem to mind. She simply pulled a few extra napkins from her pocket—as if to suggest that he’d need them—and headed back to the counter.

  “So yesterday,” Ellie said around a mouthful of grilled cheese, “in my Shakespeare section—which is my favorite—the professor called on me for the first time.”

  “Uh-oh,” Graham said without looking up from his food.

  “Exactly. I completely froze. I just kind of stuttered a little, and then I turned really red, and then there was this ridiculously long silence, and then she gave up on me.”

  “Did you know the answer?” he asked, lowering his burger.

  “That’s the worst part,” Ellie said with a nod. “The thing is…I know I’m a huge chicken in other ways, and I can be completely hopeless about stuff like this, but school was always the one place where I was fine.”

  Graham looked thoughtful as he chewed. “I think you just need more of a game face.”

  “What?”

  “A game face,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s like, when I’m about to do a big scene, where I need to act like someone bigger and braver and bolder than I really am, I stand in front of the mirror first and practice my game face.”

  He demonstrated it for her now, furrowing his brow and twisting his mouth into a deep scowl, so that he managed to look both utterly intimidating and completely clownish at the same time.

  Ellie was trying not to laugh. “I’m not sure that will help me much in Early Plays of Shakespeare.”

  “You don’t have to actually do the face,” he said, his features relaxing again. “I mean, it definitely helps if you need to get psyched up. But it’s more about the way it makes you feel. The idea is to sort of pretend you’re as tough as you look just then.”

  “Even if you’re not.”

  He nodded. “Even if you’re not.”

  Ellie thought about that moment in class when she’d sat numbly beneath the heavy gaze of the other students. She thought about the way she’d been trailing Lauren and Kara and Sprague all day, and how her first instinct when she realized Graham would be showing up on the red carpet had been to flee.

  “Though she be but little, she is fierce,” she said, and Graham—who had been swirling a fry into the pool of ketchup on his plate—looked up.

  “What?”

  “That was the answer. In my Shakespeare class. The thing I couldn’t say.” The thing I want to be, she almost added, but didn’t. “It’s from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  “Shakespeare, huh?” he said, sitting back and slinging one arm over the top of the booth. “Not the first person who comes to mind when you think tough.”

  “The pen,” Ellie told him, picking up one of the triangular halves of her grilled cheese, “is mightier than the sword.”

  “Okay, Hamlet,” he said with a grin. “Let’s see it, then.”

  “See what?”

  “Your game face.”

  Ellie was about to say no. She was about to scoff at the very idea. But then she realized that was her reaction to pretty much everything lately, and she thought better of it. Instead, she set down her grilled cheese and licked her fingers, and then she leaned across the table so that her face was very close to Graham’s.

  “Ready?” she asked, and he nodded, though she could tell he was trying not to smile. She ignored him, forcing her mouth into a straight line, and then into a frown, scrunching up her forehead, thinking of what Lauren had said earlier—be more aggressive—and what Graham had just told her—bigger, braver, bolder—all the while glaring at him with as menacing a look as she could possibly muster.

  But to her surprise, he began to laugh, the kind of laugh that’s helpless and impossible to stop, that starts in your belly and works its way right up to your eyes.

  “Come on,” she said, breaking character as she slumped back in the seat. “It couldn’t have been that bad.”

  Graham’s eyes were watering, and he reached for one of the extra napkins, dabbing at them theatrically. “I can honestly say that was the least intimidating thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  This only made her glower at him for real this time, and he waved the napkin, as if in surrender, still laughing.

  “Now that,” he admitted, “is a step in the right direction.”

  Thirteen

  By the time they finished eating, it was fully dark and a little bit chilly, the kind of night that’s caught somewhere between summer and fall, old and new.

  Outside the restaurant, Ellie bounced up and down on her toes a few times, glancing reluctantly in the direction of the theater. She didn’t feel ready to let go of Graham just yet, to return him to the throngs of screaming fans and hyperefficient handlers who were tasked with moving him around from city to city, film to film, as if he were a piece on a game board.

  Ellie looked over at him, and her stomach fluttered.

  They’d only just found each other again. And for the first time in a long time, there was still so much to say.

  Graham pulled his phone from his pocket, and Ellie could see that there were several new texts and messages, no doubt many of them from Harry.

  “We still have a little time,” he said, shoving it back into his jacket without reading them. “Should we take the long way back?”

  She nodded, not quite trusting herself to say more. Graham stuck the Yankees cap back on his head, pulling down the brim, and then, to her delight, they began to walk in the exact opposite direction of the Ziegfeld.

  Fifth Avenue looked magical at this time of night, a sea of bobbing lights from cars and taxis, the shop windows like aquariums in the dark. Neither of them spoke as they crossed Fifty-Eighth Street, and the pale facade of the green-roofed Plaza Hotel came into view. Beyond that was the great blue-black sweep of Central Park, and without any discussion, they turned toward it.

  “I like this place,” Ellie said as they waited for the light to change, standing so close that the fabric of Graham’s jacket brushed against her bare arm, making her shiver. “I wasn’t sure I would.”

  “You’ve never been?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ve been here a lot lately.”

  “You’ve been everywhere a lot lately.”

  “It’s kind of weird,” he said as they began to cross over to the park. “I never went anywhere as a kid. And now I’m all over the place. Sydney, London, Paris, Tokyo…I can’t even remember all the cities.”

  Ellie glanced over at him. “But?”

  “But I get homesick,” he said with a shrug. “Which I realize is crazy, since all that’s waiting for me there is a pig. But still.”

  They were just inside the park now, tracing a path along the edge of a murky pond, where a ring of streetlamps made blurry reflections
in the water. They stopped beside an empty bench, and Ellie sat down on one end, waiting for Graham to do the same. But he just stood there, staring down at her with a thoughtful expression, his hands deep in his pockets and the tail of his suit jacket fluttering in the breeze.

  “I can’t tell if you’re happy,” she said, trying to meet his gaze beneath the brim of the baseball cap, and he ducked his head, hesitating a beat too long before answering.

  “Honestly,” he said, “I can’t really tell, either.”

  He sat down beside her, leaving too much space between them. A woman walked by with an enormous dog, straining hard on its leash, and when they were gone and the path was empty again, Graham shook his head.

  “I don’t really mean that,” he said, sounding frustrated. “I know I’m lucky. And I know people would kill for this kind of life, these types of opportunities…”

  “I’m not a reporter,” Ellie reminded him. “You can be honest with me.”

  He’d been absentmindedly curling the end of his tie, and now he let it drop, and they both watched it unwind again. “Sometimes it’s just a lot.”

  “I can imagine,” she said, but she saw him wince and changed her mind. “No, you’re right. I can’t.”

  “Lately, I’ve just been feeling kind of suffocated. Like I can’t get enough air. Which is why it’s nice to escape sometimes.”

  “By driving way too fast.”

  “It’s not that fast.”

  “I’ve seen at least three stories about you getting pulled over.”

  “I can handle it.”

  Ellie gave him a hard look. “Just be careful, okay?”

  “You sound like my parents,” he said, and then his face softened. But before she could ask him whether things were better now—whether he still worried over the distance between them in the aftermath of his sudden fame—he nodded.

  “I’ve been seeing them a lot more lately, which is good,” he said. “My dad’s gotten completely obsessed with the landscaping at my house. I’ve got a whole crew that comes out twice a week, but whenever I’m in town, he usually just ends up dragging the mower out himself. And my mom—she thinks I eat too much takeout, so she’ll come over and spend a whole day cooking, and then my fridge ends up looking like I’m preparing for the apocalypse or something.”